[ On Tuesday, August 27, 2002 at 21:52:12 (+1000), Daniel Carosone wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: HEADS UP: migration to fully dynamic linked "base" system
>
> Those of us with English-speaking backgrounds have been quite
> successfully using these static tools with static localisations
> for some time. It's no surprise that the folks wanting to maintain
> the status quo fall into this group. They're never going to want
> to use /sbin/restore in Korean.
Well, this Western born and residing user has had the occasion to use
unix-based computers in several Asian countries, including Korea as it
happens, and I've explicitly used locale support as a training tool
(make some demonstration work in EN_US, and then switch to the locale of
the user's I'm training and be able to point to various phrases in their
language and describe what they mean (in English, my only tongue) so
they can get it in their native tongue at the same time)
None of this however has anything to do with requiring dynamically
loadable locale support code -- and the computers being used could
easily have the capacity to handle static-linked binaries containing
simultaneously available support for many other locales too (or they
could have been supporting just EN_US and the one target locale).
Only in a proprietary system is it really necessary to have a documented
public API for pluggable locale support.
(I do like your idea of patching in specific local support at install
time -- it's probably even not hard to come up with a scheme that's a
lot simpler than a generic object-code linker too.)
--
Greg A. Woods
+1 416 218-0098; <g.a.woods@ieee.org>; <woods@robohack.ca>
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>; VE3TCP; Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>